Crazywise

Crazywise follows young people passing through acute psychological crisis and sets their accounts beside indigenous and cross-cultural readings of extreme states. Phil Borges, a photographer with long experience among tribal and shamanic communities, and co-director Kevin Tomlinson built the film around two figures, Adam Gentry and Ekhaya Esima, who move from breakdown toward recovery, alongside clinicians and writers who question a strictly biomedical account of psychosis.

Contributors including Gabor Mate, Robert Whitaker, Joan Halifax and Stanislav Grof suggest that what Western psychiatry classes as illness may, in other cultural settings, be read as a difficult passage carrying meaning and possible value. The film advances this as an argument rather than a settled finding. Reviewers noted its sympathy for recovery-oriented and non-medical approaches while recognising that it presses a definite position throughout.

For a psychodynamic clinician the film assembles a pluralist frame for psychosis and crisis, one that holds meaning-making alongside symptom suppression rather than treating them as rivals. It attends to how culture shapes the form a breakdown takes and the routes back from it, and to first-person testimony about what sustained people during and after their crises.